Protecting Mobile Health Records in Cloud Computing: A Secure, Efficient, and Anonymous Design

Electronic healthcare (eHealth) systems have replaced traditional paper-based medical systems due to attractive features such as universal accessibility, high accuracy, and low cost. As a major constituent part of eHealth systems, mobile healthcare (mHealth) applies Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and Embedded Devices (EDs), such as tablets, smartphones, and other devices embedded in the bodies of individuals, to improve the quality of life and provide more convenient healthcare services for patients. Unfortunately, MIDs and EDs have only limited computational capacity, storage space, and power supply. By taking this into account, we present a new design to guarantee the integrity of eHealth records and the anonymity of the data owner in a more efficient and flexible way. The essence of our design is a general method which can convert any secure Attribute-Based Signature (ABS) scheme into a highly efficient and secure Online/Offline Attribute-Based Signature (OOABS) scheme. We prove the security and analyze the efficiency improvement of the new design. Additionally, we illustrate the proposed generic construction by applying it to a specific ABS scheme.